Seen through today's magnifying glass, he appears to us as a proto-modern artist, but El Greco was first and foremost a painter of vision and spirit. His powerful intuition was to bring back on canvas to a perfect synthesis the different languages of art to which he felt he belonged: the Byzantine East from which he started, the Italy of the Renaissance where he was trained and where he had struggled to find fortune, the Spain of Philip II and the Counter-Reformation where he had achieved success.
The El Greco exhibition tells the story of the human and artistic adventure of the cosmopolitan master who traveled along the shores of the Mediterranean and managed to create a myth around his figure. El Greco started from the flat symbolic world of Byzantine icons to embrace the humanistic and global vision of Renaissance painting, ultimately expressing an almost conceptual art. According to Keith Christiansen, curator of the European Painting department of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, no other Western artist before him had ever managed to reach such heights of originality. This is the reason why El Greco today enjoys widespread fame and occupies a leading place in the Pantheon of art greats.
